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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our conversation with Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect to talk about another of his recent articles, this one headlined “Is the Press Next?” Kuttner writes, quote, “As Trump tries to destroy one free institution after another — universities, law firms, independent public agencies, trade unions — sooner or later he will come for the press,” Kuttner writes.
And Trump’s attacks on the press have already begun. In December, ABC News settled a defamation suit filed by President-elect Trump instead of taking the case to court. As part of the deal, ABC will donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The White House has also banned the Associated Press from covering some presidential events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. After suffering a court setback, the White House moved to restrict access to all of the wire services.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has also repeatedly attacked 60 Minutes, CBS’s flagship investigative news program. Trump has urged the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS’s license. And in his personal capacity, Trump has filed a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year. This all comes as CBS’s parent company Paramount Global is seeking FCC approval for its proposed $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Earlier this week, there was a major shakeup at 60 Minutes. The show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, resigned, saying, quote, “Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience,” he said. Semafor has reported Paramount’s Shari Redstone had begun personally keeping tabs on 60 Minutes segments about Trump.
Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect is still with us, along with Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work defending free expression in the Philippines.
Robert Kuttner, we’re going to start with you laying out what is taking place here, when you have 60 Minutes’ head leaving, saying he can no longer ensure its independence, and you have this merger that Shari Redstone is trying to accomplish with Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, and his son David Ellison, known Trump allies. Talk about all of this.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, my worry is that this is just the beginning. If they want it to become really systematic, in this article, “Is the Press Next?,” I ticked off all the things they might do.
So, the first thing they might do is they might go after the nonprofit tax-exempt status of much of the progressive media, so-called 501(c)(3) status, that allows you to get foundation grants. And to be a 501(c)(3), you’re not supposed to be political. And, you know, just between us and your audience, a lot of the left press is pretty tough on Trump, as it ought to be. So, Trump could go to the — now, it’s illegal for the president to, you know, abruptly pull the tax exemption of any organization. But you could get the IRS to launch an investigation, and you could find that — shock, shock — several progressive media are actually pretty critical of Trump, and maybe they don’t deserve a 501(c)(3) status. That, in turn, would spook their foundations, because they’re also 501(c)(3)s, they’re tax-exempt, and you could threaten their tax exemptions. So, that’s just one thing he could do.
You already have a kind of anticipatory capitulation, appeasement, on the part of big corporate owners of The Washington Post and the L.A. Times, and sometimes The New York Times feels like it’s pulling its punches, because when a billionaire owns a media property — I hate the word — they have their other business interests to look out for, Shari Redstone being a classical example. So you’ve got self-censorship. That’s a second evil.
You’ve also got the fact that, you know, public broadcasting broadcasts on frequencies that are allocated by the FCC. The FCC could say, “Hey, actually, we need those frequencies for national security purposes. And public radio stations, you don’t get to broadcast over the air anymore.” So —
AMY GOODMAN: And Congress has already started an investigation into PBS and NPR.
ROBERT KUTTNER: That’s correct. So, Trump could play harder hardball. Now, the good news here is this is protected by the First Amendment. And in the last segment, we talked about briefly the Supreme Court discovering the fact that its primary job is to uphold the rule of law. And it doesn’t get any more fundamental than the First Amendment. So that might slow down Trump.
The other interesting thing is that more and more and more Americans get their news, regardless of what the original news source is, from the internet. They don’t read newspapers anymore. And a lot of listeners to public radio listen on the internet. It’s hard to censor the internet. And you could imagine media gravitating to the internet. Even the Chinese Communist Party had trouble creating what was called the Great Firewall of China to keep Chinese citizens from accessing the internet. So, I don’t think he’s going to put the free press out of business, but I think we need to be vigilant.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to get Maria Ressa to comment on what’s happening in the U.S., as well. Of course, you have devoted your life to fighting for free expression in the Philippines, for which you were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. So, if you could talk first about your site Rappler, the repeated attempts by the Duterte government to have you imprisoned, several — 10, I believe — arrest warrants issued against you, and how, despite all of that, you kept Rappler running throughout?
MARIA RESSA: Yeah, no. First, thank you for having me.
But, you know, let me just be a little bit more dire than Robert. I just came from Perugia, from the International Journalism Festival, where V-Dem, which does kind of a rating of all democracies globally — right? — their latest report now says that 72% of the world is under autocratic rule. Like, we have elected illiberal leaders in 72% — in these democracies around the world, right? But —
AMY GOODMAN: How do they classify the U.S.?
MARIA RESSA: The U.S. is — so, here’s what he said. The head of V-Dem publicly said that if the trends in America continue, that he expects democracy to die by the summer. Like, not just to wake you up, right? Like, literally. And actually, if we stop normalizing the death by a thousand cuts of rule of law, you can see this happening, right? For the Turkish grad student picked up from the streets from Tufts University, from all of the little things — we’ve talked here about the press. The press was attacked in the first Trump administration, right? Duterte echoed President Trump. President Trump echoed Duterte. “Enemies of the people,” that’s what they both called us.
But the point here is, it’s — we normalize new depths. Like, we should not be where we are, and yet that’s where we are. And what are you seeing being created? At the early days, in the first month, I called at the Filipinization of American politics. But I think it’s even worse, because what you’re seeing, not many mainstream covered the government pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — right? — saying, essentially telling Americans that it’s OK to be corrupt, because you need to be competitive. These are the ideals that are being broken down. So, what are we seeing? We’re seeing the creation of a kleptocracy.
The last part here is, Robert talked about the internet. But these Big Tech companies, the “broligarchy,” who were there in the front row, right?
AMY GOODMAN: At his inauguration.
MARIA RESSA: At his inauguration. The design of social media — and this was a clip you ran in the tease at the beginning — it literally turns the incentive structure upside down, is on the side of a populist — a dictator-to-be, right? Because why? In 2018, MIT said that lies spread six times faster. That was before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X and turned it into a human cesspool, even worse than it was in 2018. So, if lies spread six times faster, and fear, anger and hate — this is across the world — if you use fear, anger and hate, it spreads — and I hate to — I put rabbit ears on “information” — the post spreads virally, right? So, there are more ways. Online violence is real-world violence. The reason why 72% of the world today is now under authoritarian rule is partly because our public information ecosystem is corrupted. Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember you being on the show here years ago, when Duterte was really going after you, when he was the leader of the Philippines, now — and we’ll talk about this in a moment —
MARIA RESSA: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — he’s in prison at The Hague. But when you walked out, you said, “Don’t take this as just an example of, you know, this sort of story of the Philippines.” You said, “This could be happening to you in just a few years. I see us as a warning for you.” So, talk about — I mean, Nermeen mentioned how many times they attempted to arrest you.
MARIA RESSA: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you dealt with this and how you fought back, because I think law firms are seeing —
MARIA RESSA: Law firms, academe —
AMY GOODMAN: — universities are seeing —
MARIA RESSA: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — all of these institutions, when they fight back, yes, Trump blinks.
MARIA RESSA: So, first, I think the biggest lesson we learned is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks. Every day you do not fight back, you lose just a little bit more of your rights. We normalize just a little bit more of this kind of pseudo-democracy, right?
So, we need to — I think the first is that — what are the steps? Right? Social media was used to attack us. And it’s like fertilizer. Saying you’re the enemy of the press then lets people believe. That’s astroturfing. For me, hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa was trended by pro-government, by pro-Duterte information operations two years before I was actually arrested. And that sets the stage. It’s like fertilizer. So, social media, then media capture. And Robert talked about the chilling effect. Forget the chilling — it’s Siberia. And business interests. I talked about the three Cs: corrupt, coerce, coopt. For every single institution that is broken down — media, academe, NGO capture, state capture. And each step of the way as you go down, rule of law breaks down, and you lose — it’s death by a thousand cuts of your rights.
So, in the Philippines, you know, it was a rallying cry for us, because I’m a traditional journalist in the old sense of the word, right? And I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism. So, in our case, I said, “We hold the line. This is the line where the Constitution gives us our rights.” The Philippines, like the United States, has three branches, coequal branches of government. And the United States is following the Philippines, what happened under Duterte, a very powerful executive, a coopted legislature. And it took Duterte six months to crush the checks and balances of the Philippines, to get rid of institutional checks on his power.
The judiciary, what happens with the judiciary is not only — you talked about the 10 arrest warrants I have. Eight years later, we’ve won eight of the 10 cases, but I still have to ask for the Philippines — for approval to travel from the Philippines Supreme Court. What rights you lose today, you will not get back. Right?
Like, this is part of the reason why, if you value your rights, you stand up for them. You hold the line. Because silence is complicity. Silence gives approval for it, and we create a new normal. Even reporting has to slightly change. You have to call a lie a lie. You have to put the context to it. And anyway, sorry, I could talk about this forever. I feel like I have PTSD and déjà vu all combined. You know, it’s shocking America is where it is today.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But tell us. So, what happened with Rappler? There were constant attempts to shut it down, but somehow you moved the servers abroad or you did something to make sure that, despite the crackdown on the media, you were able to continue running.
MARIA RESSA: We prepared. Right? You embrace your fear. And once I figured out what were the worst-case scenarios we could have, we work flowed. I mean, Rappler is small. It’s 100, 120 people. And we told our people very early on, when the government first tried to shut us down in January 2018, “You may not want to be here. This is going to be a different thing.” Everyone has a different risk appetite, right? So we gave our reporters the option to leave Rappler, because I said, “We’ll help place you in another news organization.” Not one reporter took that. Right?
And the other part is, once you know who you are and what you stand for and you’re ready for the worst case, then you stand up for your rights. I think that’s the challenge today. In How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the question I asked Filipinos, and I now ask — the reason why I thought it was coming for every democracy around the world is this tech is global. You know, what it proved is that we could all be manipulated in the exact same way, regardless of country or culture. It was like looking at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Oh my god! And we’re allowing this to happen. They’re doing it with impunity for profit. So, hold the line, don’t give up your rights, because you only get weaker over time.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you win the Nobel Peace Prize. You travel the world talking about freedom of the press. And Duterte is in jail. Let’s talk about this. Former President Rodrigo Duterte was flown to The Hague after being arrested in Manila for crimes against humanity on an International Criminal Court warrant. The ICC has been investigating Duterte since 2018 — as you have, even further back — over his extrajudicial so-called war on drugs that the U.N. estimates killed over 8,600 people. Human rights groups in the Philippines say the death toll is more like 30,000.
MARIA RESSA: More.
AMY GOODMAN: Many children were among those killed. Last year, the former president admitted under oath he oversaw a death squad of gangsters while he served as mayor of the southern city of Davao. Can you talk about what this means for the Philippines?
MARIA RESSA: Well, it doesn’t end — right? — the fight. So, what is it? How did he get arrested? It was the work of so many families, so many victims who refuse to be victims. And over time, it took that long. And part of it was also Gaza, right? We were told — we’ve been looking for this since August of 20 — my gosh, when was that? 2022. Right? Soon after the pandemic. So it took a long time, a lot of work, a focus on justice.
And I think the interesting thing here is that what’s at stake for the world today is whether or not an international rules-based order still exists, whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza or tech, right? And then, what the Philippines proved is that — and people will say, “Well, it’s power politics.” Everything is power politics. What the Philippines proved is that little Philippines actually honored an ICC — the very first time a Filipino president has been charged with crimes against humanity, when he was arrested. I was in the Philippines when that happened. We broke the story in Rappler for the arrest warrant. And when that happened, we didn’t know it was going to happen.
And I think that’s the part I really want to tell Americans, that you take step by step towards the goal of your values, towards the rights you have. And you don’t know what will happen. It’s incredibly uncertain. There were times I thought I would go to jail. There were times I had to wear a bulletproof vest in the car. Right? But you hold tight. And I think that’s what — I lost my right to travel. Five times, I couldn’t travel. Then the Nobel Prize happened, and I could travel. But I’ve still lost some rights. Sorry. The Philippines proved that an international human rights-based order can exist. But we have elections. It’s two weeks, May 12th, our elections, midterm elections. It’s a battle between Marcos and Duterte, the president and his vice president. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Duterte’s daughter.
MARIA RESSA: Duterte’s daughter. And Duterte, now in prison at The Hague, has been given a boost. The massive disinformation that has come to the Philippines, Rappler has done three or four stories to track this disinformation, that even though Filipinos know we’re being manipulated online, we continue to get manipulated, because it’s our emotions, right? If Duterte’s allies win at the Senate, his daughter is facing impeachment charges, corruption. Again, kleptocracy. It is power in money, right? This is where the world is headed. Hello. And then, what happens is, if his allies win, Sara Duterte may actually then survive the impeachment, may not be — may not lose her post. And that means that’s a setup again for another Duterte for our presidential elections. It doesn’t end, but the fights for your rights continues. Are you going to be silent?
And here’s the last part. Fear is real. I mean, in the Philippines, there were an average of eight dead bodies dumped on the sidewalk every night. We had one reporter going out every night, right? So, fear is real. And there were times I was angry at Filipinos for not doing more. But we kept going. And I think the Philippines shows you that it could take a while, but justice does happen. But it depends on what happens in America now — right? — where the world goes. It’s still true: What happens to America will — America catches a cold, so does the entire world. Right? So, look at the markets, as you’ve done. Anyway, hold on to your rights. And I’m worried about 2025 and where the world will take us.
